“If your masters do what we say, we won’t have to,” Zahra said. “We’ll let you return to them when our own people are safe. After we’ve claimed our home, nothing you or your oppressors do will concern us.”

She spoke the word home with a reverence I could not comprehend. She wasn’t looking at Baqir or me. She was gazing out the window with an expression of understated wonder, almost joy. She looked happier, more relaxed, when her eyes rested not on her prisoners or her comrades, but on the monstrosity of a ship growing ever larger as the shuttle soared toward it. She did not fear House of Wisdom. She stared at it with something a lot like yearning.

I had seen it from this distance before. I had been splattered with blood then, too, and shivering with cold, too short and skinny to sit comfortably in the pilot’s seat in my mother’s experimental craft. Tiger had curved slowly away from House of Wisdom at first, the autopilot moving it a safe distance before engaging the full power of the engines. During that slow retreat I had wept, crying for my father, for my mother, overwhelmed by the nightmarish horror of that day. I had been frantic as I watched the ship that had been my childhood home grow smaller and smaller.

Then Tiger’s propulsion system had fired up. All I remembered after that was pain.

House of Wisdom looked the same as it had before. Dark, blocky, ugly. Nobody had been this close in ten years.

When my mother had buckled me into the pilot’s seat of her experimental ship and programmed the controls, she told me, over and over again, that I would be safe, I would be okay, she was going to get me away. I would be safe. I would be okay. She hadn’t been crying; I remembered that clearly. She had been jittery with quick, determined motions, her voice higher than usual, her breath fast. I had asked, Are you coming with me?

My mother had only pushed hair damp with sweat and clumped with blood back from my face, kissed my forehead, and straightened the harness over the front of my pajamas. She said, I’ve got some things to do first.

The horrors aboard House of Wisdom had been locked away for ten years. On the ship, in lost data, in sealed files, in the memories I never, ever spoke aloud.

And I had just helped open the door.

The ship’s velocity abruptly changed. Salvatore’s blood broke from its shimmering galaxy and splattered across my face, across Baqir’s, across the seats and the walls, over the window, dark and red and specked with bone and brain, obscuring the view.

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